Khmer Rouge

While riding around the countryside near Batambang in cambodia I came upon a quiet temple out in the middle of nowhere. Travelling past the temple I came to several fallen statues including this chap who looked like a warrior fallen in battle.

Fallen warrior

Riding past this I came to a shrine that was most disturbing. It was in memory to all the people that had suffered at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. It was quite tall and pagoda like with murals around the outside depicting what these people had gone through in this terrible time in their history. History? Plenty of people still remember what happened. I think its what is called living history. Most of these murals are most disturbing and I think they deserve their own blog page just so that us westerners can sit back and realise just how lucky we are.

People are forced to build the Kamping Poy Dam. Many perished during the building. Many women in the labour force were raped and killed.

A Buddhist Temple is used as a prison and desecrated

The investigator extracting victims fingernails. Women are raped and killed.

All children aged 3-9 years are taken from their parents.

People were forced to work hard from dusk to dawn to cut the jute in the water a meeting at night.

Men and women were systematically chosen to be killed as an example to others. They said “If we keep you it is no gain, if we kill you it is no gain”

The sharp edge of a palm leaf is used as a knife to slit the throat of a victim.

During interrogation the victims are forced to admit and confess to any crime posed by their jailers.

A Lon Nol officer and his family are tortured. The children are killed while the parents are forced to watch then they are executed.

The torturers split open their victims chest and abdomens, remove their livers and cannibalize their organ.

In Tams nephew is killed

Plastic bags are used to suffocate victims during interrogations. Water dunking is used to terrify victims.

As a prelude to a mass execution, the victims are strung together with rope that was threaded through holes that had been cut into their hands to prevent their escape.

The place was very quiet with no one about as I walked round taking these photos and reading the writing. Yet despite the harrowing murals the thing that really sent a shiver down my spine was the building in the center. The windows around the outside were about were about 4ft from the ground and about 8ft high and they showed stacked inside the bones of some of the victims. Rows and rows from the bottom of the window all the way to the top. Eyeless skulls staring out into a sunshine they would never experience again.

Just a few of the victims.

These atrocities are a well documented fact, not fiction. Over 3 million men women and children were murdered between 1970 and 1980. To give you an idea of what this means in real terms the population of Cambodia at the time was estimated at slightly over 7 million. That is nearly half the people in the entire country. In England today that would be equivalent to 24 million people or nearly 2 and a half million people being randomly killed every year for ten years.